The new production of a 2013 play by Michael Perlman is from Creative License, a bold, progressive theater company, and it also demonstrates the benefits of a core group of like-minded actors and directors working together repeatedly.

Nobody in the cast misses a beat or hits a false note, not for a single moment of the provocative, 85-minute running time, as deep wounds from half a lifetime ago explode after a high school bully is denounced during an Oscars telecast. As an audience member, you alternately marvel and want to applaud choices tiny and major by the four-member cast and director Aaron Holbritter, from the flipping over of a newspaper at the end of a scene to the overall modulation of pace, volume and intensity of arguments. This is how people talk and fight; this is how single words, or even mere inflections, blow up into moments that injure far beyond their intent. It's real, raw, rewarding.

The action starts before the play opens, both immediately prior and about 15 years ago. As the lights come up, pair of close friends, now about 30, are staring, stunned, at the TV after a former classmate of one of the men, in his Oscar acceptance speech for an autobiographical film he wrote and directed, named the man as being a bully responsible for the suicide of another classmate.

The accused is Ethan (Ian LaChance), and he eventually admits that he was indeed a cruel tormentor to his late classmate, but he insists he's no longer that person, a claim undercut by bigotry that peeks out in excited utterances. He attempts an apology in an online video, but it is rejected as insufficient by the Oscar winner, Dennis (Nick Bosanko), who himself was bullied by Ethan in high school and uses the power of his newfound fame as an indie-film star to seek justice for his lost friend.

The pair post an escalating series of videos, Ethan's contrition growing into anger and Dennis' recrimination shading toward vengeance, despite pleas for a ceasefire from Ethan's best friend, John (Isaac Newberry), and Dennis' boyfriend, Gregory (Steve Maggio).

Though the script suffers from an occasional contrivance and a final scene that feels superfluous, Holbritter and his cast find deep truths about the lasting effects of teenage trauma and the legacy they leave us to deal with as adults. As created by a cast that is the most uniformly excellent of any Creative License I've seen — they're as good here as the best professional ensembles in contemporary dramas in the Berkshires and at Capital Repertory Theatre — these are real people: flawed and recovering, misguided and well intentioned. They're making their way, stumbling toward better versions of themselves despite the burdens of the past.